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CentOS 6.3 released

Less than three weeks after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3, the CentOS Project has released its clone of the Red Hat distribution. As ever, the CentOS development team has striven to ensure that version 6.3 is 100% compatible with the original. This means the distribution contains nearly all of the new features introduced in RHEL 6.3 – OpenOffice 3.2 has been replaced by LibreOffice 3.4, many drivers have been updated and there have been a number of improvements in the area of virtualisation. The distribution also includes virt-P2V, a tool for converting live installations into virtual machines. CentOS does not, however, include the bootable ISO image of virt-P2V available from Red Hat.

The release notes list many of the key features and provide details of where the distribution differs from the original. Oracle released its RHEL 6.3 clone, Oracle Linux 6.3, in late June. Oracle added some extra functions to the distribution and included a new, optional kernel, so its behaviour is more likely to deviate from the original than the CentOS clone.

Update 10-07-12: Even though the virt-P2V ISO is not available separately from CentOS like it is on the Red Hat Network, the distribution does include the ISO file within the virt-p2v RPM package.